The Bluestocking 352: Gaiman and T for Jesus

the value of a bat is infinite

Happy Friday!

STRONG MESSAGE HERE is back for a new series, for the next 10 weeks. Yesterday’s episode was about political attacks.

Helen

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Photo: Guerin Blask/August

There is no Safe Word (New York magazine)

In The Sandman, the DC comic-book series that ran from 1989 to 1996 and made [Neil] Gaiman famous, he tells a story about a writer named Richard Madoc. After Madoc’s first book proves a success, he sits down to write his second and finds that he can’t come up with a single decent idea. This difficulty recedes after he accepts an unusual gift from an older author: a naked woman, of a kind, who has been kept locked in a room in his house for 60 years. She is Calliope, the youngest of the Nine Muses. Madoc rapes her, again and again, and his career blossoms in the most extraordinary way. A stylish young beauty tells him how much she loved his characterization of a strong female character, prompting him to remark, “Actually, I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer.” His downfall comes only when the titular hero, the Sandman, also known as the Prince of Stories, frees Calliope from bondage. A being of boundless charisma and creativity, the Sandman rules the Dreaming, the realm we visit in our sleep, where “stories are spun.” Older and more powerful than the most powerful gods, he can reward us with exquisite delights or punish us with unending nightmares, depending on what he feels we deserve. To punish the rapist, the Sandman floods Madoc’s mind with such a wild torrent of ideas that he’s powerless to write them down, let alone profit from them.

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Mixed feelings about this New York magazine piece on allegations of sadistic sexual abuse against Neil Gaiman, mostly because I thought last year’s Tortoise podcast, Master, was excellent. I feel annoyed on its journalists’ behalf that it made so little impact, whereas this written piece has gone viral and will likely end Gaiman’s career.

The author, Lila Shapiro, uses four of the same sources as Tortoise, which is briefly credited, and has found four more, making similar allegations. She deserves credit for a really meaty, brave bit of journalism, but I do also recommend the podcast in tandem with this. It does two things brilliantly in particular.

The first is using recordings of Gaiman himself; in one episode, you hear him on a voicemail, giving the spiel that he used to pick up women—I’m a shy English nerd and my outrageous bohemian wife says I need to loosen up. You can see why people went for it: he’s a beloved author, claiming to be sexually repressed, and you—his 21-year-old fan—are the only one who can make him feel cherished again! That’s a potent female romantic fantasy, right there.

I say romantic, because it’s notable that in one of the cases (his live-in property guardian) the abusiveness of what was happening only clicked for the woman involved when this happened:

But at the end of their second encounter, she remembers asking Gaiman what Palmer would think about their romance: “He said, ‘Caroline, there is no romance.’”

The second thing I loved about the podcast is that it delved a lot more deeply into the trickiness of consent, particularly when filtered through power dynamics and S&M. The NY piece takes it as read that we won’t disbelieve these allegations, even though at least one of the women involved sent Gaiman messages saying how much she enjoyed their encounters. Tortoise was more honest in confronting the fact that many people will.

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© Lorenzo Matteucci

Taking T for Jesus (The Baffler)

A few years ago, my then-eighty-year-old mom started taking testosterone to improve her health and sex life. As with most of her major life decisions, she got the idea from a guest on a televangelist’s talk show. The guests, Don Colbert, who bills himself as “America’s #1 Doctor for Faith and Preventative Medicine,” and his wife, Mary, contend that hormone therapy can keep elderly women (and men) in divine health. According to the Colberts, testosterone therapy for women clears brain fog, removes belly fat, prevents wrinkles, cures migraine, enhances libido, and generally restores one’s zeal for life. After seeing the Colberts’ segments on Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel and The Jim Bakker Show, and reading Don’s book about bioidentical hormones, my mom tracked down a doctor willing to prescribe her testosterone—and a little progesterone for good measure. She opted for an implant injected into her butt every three months, joining the approximately 2 to 7 percent of women over sixty-five who take hormone therapy.

Having survived multiple strokes, my mom was at high risk for complications, so she didn’t want me to know about the hormone therapy at first. I only found out in 2022, when she’d been on it for about two years.

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Some of my more gender-critical readers will recoil from the topspin on this article (the author doesn’t seem to connect the fact that T raises your risk of cardiovascular problems with the fact that some people might therefore be cautious to putting minors on a lifelong prescription for it). But putting that aside, this is a great insight into something I didn’t know—televangelists are getting into hormones.

At some point, I want to report out (or pressure someone else into reporting out) just how widespread testosterone replacement therapy is among the middle-aged manosphere. The same people who are very skeptical about Big Pharma are also looking suspiciously swole into their 50s, 60s, 70s. . . (Ditto, please enjoy the newly svelte Alex Jones insisting that he is NOT on the very well-tested and effective Big Pharma product that is Ozempic, and has actually just lost weight through taking his own homeopathic supplements.)

HRT is a fascinating cultural and medical phenomenon. It definitely works — testosterone will stop you losing muscle mass, oestrogen will alleviate your hot flashes. But we don’t entirely know the longterm risks, or the optimum dosing regime.

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Quick Links

1. “The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.” Peter Thiel also wants answers about the JFK assassination. When did everyone turn into Fox Mulder? (Financial Times, £)

2. I thought it was so bananas that I wrote about it for The Atlantic (gift link).

3. Great story ideas I don’t have time to report out: is Elon Musk just paying Chinese adolescents to level up his characters in computer games? (Reddit)

4. Who’s paying for fake five-star reviews of the Ritz? Jim Waterson investigates and discovers it’s a kind of “task scam,” something that I suggest you acquaint yourself with, in case anyone you know succumbs to it (London Centric, £)

5. “Natural England’s view was that: “no bat death is acceptable”. Functionally, that’s exactly the same as saying that the value of a bat is infinite.” Martin Robbins feeds my increasing obsession with the HS2 bat tunnel (Substack).

6. “Caitlyn Jenner, Iggy Azalea, and Andrew Tate all launched self-referential celebcoins this year. Lionel Messi lent his name to some digital duds. Human beings invested real funds into speculative and sometimes even lucrative e-tokens named for frogs, hippos, and squirrels.” As if celebrities having alcohol brands weren’t bad enough, now they have crypto projects. Here’s a look at the crash of Hawk Tuah Girl’s memecoin. This story also features a description of Ellen DeGeneres as an “apex predator” and someone else as the “cockroach of the internet” (The Ringer).

7. “In this setup, there are a few ways to increase per capita growth. You could reduce population (the Black Death model of growth), you could increase the capital stock (i.e. the Industrial Revolution), or you could magic up technology (also the Industrial Revolution).” Political nerds assemble: Ben Ansell explains various theories of economic growth, and asks which one Labour subscribes to (spoiler: who knows?).

8. In a similar vein, smart people have been discussing this piece on Labour’s various intellectual traditions: “neo-Bevinite”, “neo-Croslandite”, and “neo-Blairite” (Renewal).

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